Sunday, May 13, 2012

Making Maple Confectioner's Sugar

It was Mother's Day this weekend but it was also my daughter's birthday.

My grandson and I worked very hard to make his mom a birthday cake. It was a gluten-free yellow cake with a gluten-free icing that was surprisingly good.

My daughter's only request was to make a cake her youngest son could eat. This was a difficult task since he can't have honey or cane sugar. He is allergic to yeast so he has to eat things that don't feed yeast to help keep the yeast at bay.

He can have maple sugar, agave nectar and corn syrup in small amounts.

He wanted to make a yellow cake--not cupcakes--with chocolate decorator's icing. The only thing I could use was maple sugar and make my own version of Confectioner's sugar. This is what I did.

I used my Vitamix blender and poured a cup of maple sugar in at a time and then whizzed it until it was a fine powder. I then added a cup of maple sugar two more times. Be the end, I three light cups maple confectioner's sugar and then I added 3 tablespoons of corn starch and mixed it into the powdered maple sugar.

In a mixing bowl, to the newly powdered maple sugar, I mixed in 3/4 cup of cocoa, 3/4 cup of butter, 2 teaspoons of vanilla flavoring and 1/3 cup of almond milk. I mixed all of this well. The resulting frosting was silky smooth and make a very good decorator's frosting.

I was quite amazed that I could make Confectioner's sugar this way. I know that if I was short on regular Confectioner's sugar, I could make it out of regular cane sugar with my Vitamix blender. I was very surprised by how well it worked.

We did have one very happy boy who loved his cake, by the way. My daughter loved making him happy.